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This book demonstrates a fruitful cross-fertilisation of ideas between British queer history and art history. It engages with self-identified lesbians and with another highly important source for queer history: oral history. The book highlights the international dimension of what to date has been told as a classic British tale of homosexual law reform and also illuminates the choices made and constraints imposed at the national level. It embarks on a queer critical history, arguing for the centrality, in John Everett Millais's life-writing, of the strange-to-us category of unconventionality. The book aims to expose the queer implications of celebrity gossip writing. It offers a historical analysis of the link between homosexual men and gossip by examining the origins of the gossip column in the British tabloid press in the three decades after 1910. The book provides an overview of the emergence and consolidation of a number of new discourses of homosexuality as a social practice in postwar Britain. It explores a British variant on homophile internationalism before and immediately after the 1967 Sexual Offences Act by mapping Grey's cross-border connections while noting strain against transnational solidarity. The book focuses on evidence collected by the 1977 Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship to illustrate how gay men conceptualised the place of pornography in their lives and its role in the broader struggle for the freedom.
internationalism realised by ICSE, the case of HLRS may help further to elucidate that culture’s possibilities and limitations. This chapter, then, explores a British variant on homophile internationalism before and immediately after the 1967 Sexual Offences Act by mapping Grey’s cross-border connections while noting strain against transnational solidarity. In charge of HLRS’s day-to-day operation during this period, Grey authored and received much of the correspondence on which this chapter is based, although his work more generally depended on HLRS’s Executive
female sexual partners, a more bisexual use of the term that was in use by the late 1950s. 53 Either way, the term held definite sexual connotations that made clear the posters’ interest in homosexual activity. By the December 1966 issue, published just months before the new Sexual Offences Act legalised consensual homosexual acts between men aged twenty-one and over conducted in private, the contact ads were gone but the magazine’s other queer elements all remained. 54 The Filk’ns were still advertising their Brighton bachelor rental apartment, now costing
commercialised sexual landscape in the decade of the Teddy Boy and the Suez Crisis and, in the process, rightly questioned the somewhat triumphalist and whiggish narrative of 1960s ‘permissiveness’, no one can deny that the visual, material and literary culture of queerness, embodied in the form of the physique magazine and other products, expanded dramatically in the years following the passage of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. 4 As a new gay culture and politics took hold in the late 1960s and 1970s, the growing sense that same-sex-desiring men needed to produce ./figures
caught fire and spread, these organisations – and in particular the Anglo-American network – shared magazines, letters, people and strategies in a mutual search for inspiration, support and legitimacy. In the wake of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, which partially decriminalised gay sex in Britain, Grey set off on a speaker’s tour of the US at the invitation of American activists committed to law reform. He was broadly welcomed, but his tour brought out not only the infighting between competing US homophile factions but also the differences in tactics on both sides of